The demand for graduates in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) has steadily increased in the last decades. In the United States alone, jobs for biomedical engineers are expected to increase by 62 percent by 2020, while jobs in software development and medical science are expected to increase by 32 percent and 36 percent, respectively. Combine with an insufficient number of students enrolled in STEM fields, this will result in about 2.4 million STEM job vacancies by 2018.
Therefore, increasing the number of STEM graduates is currently a national priority for many governments worldwide. An effective way to engage young minds in STEM disciplines is to introduce robotic kits into primary and secondary education. The most widely used robotic kits, such as LEGO Mindstorm, the VEX Robotics, and the Fishertechnik, are composed by libraries of prefabricated parts that are not interoperable among kits from different vendors. Alternatives to these popular robotic kits are either highly modular, but very expensive (e.g., Kondo, Bioloid, Cubelets, K-Junior V2 and Kephera) and unaffordable for a majority of schools, or single-configuration and low-cost robots (e.g., AERObot, iRobot, and Boe-Bot) with a restricted number of activities possible. An afforadable solution that provides a number of interchangeable modules is littleBits. This platform offers a variety of sensing and actuation modules that use magnets to connect, but lack programmability, and thus it limits students' ability to learn about coding.